Molly Ringwald Reveals Her “Troubling” Feelings About Sexual Harassment In ‘The Breakfast Club’

Molly Ringwald, 50, has written an op-ed article for the New Yorker describing her “troubling” feelings when her daughter asked to watch The Breakfast Club with her.

Ringwald recalled the uneasy feeling when her daughter asked to watch the iconic 1980s movie. “When my daughter proposed watching The Breakfast Club together, I hesitated, not knowing how she would react: if she would understand the film or if she would even like it,” she wrote.”I worried that she would find some aspects troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would be most troubling to me.”

 

Since the rise of the #MeToo movement, there has been a lot more focus on sexual harassment in society. Ringwald has been thinking back to a certain scene that might allude to sexual harassment but went unnoticed at the time.

“At one point in the film, the bad-boy character, John Bender (Judd Nelson), ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher,” she wrote. “While there, takes the opportunity to peek under Claire’s skirt and, though the audience doesn’t see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately.”

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“We kept watching… but I kept thinking about that scene,” she said. Ringwald said it made her think of all the women that were allegedly raped and sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein.

Ringwald also pointed out how Nelson’s character, “sexually harasses Claire throughout the film.”

She posed a question: “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” She continued stating that “erasing history” isn’t the answer but “remembering the past, in all its transgressions and barbarism” is how we “gauge how far we’ve come.”

“The conversations about them will change, and the should. It’s up to the following generations to figure out how to continue those conversations and make them their own — to keep talking, in schools, in activism, and art  — and trust that we care,” Ringwald concluded.